Presented as the next step on from Azure Data Factory, this Fabric workload moves and reshapes data using copy jobs, mirroring, Dataflow Gen2 and pipelines.
Also called Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric.
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Terms in this definition
- NEXT
Restricted to visual calculations, this DAX function reads the value one step further along an axis of the visual matrix; writing OFFSET with 1 gives the same result.
- Azure Data Factory
Managed data integration service for ETL and ELT, built from pipelines, copy activities, triggers, mapping data flows and integration runtimes. It works in batches rather than routing individual transactions.
- Fabric workload
Microsoft Fabric groups its features into workloads, each serving a role or job, for instance Power BI, Real-Time Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Data Factory or Data Engineering; they all read and write the same OneLake data.
- Mirroring
A way of keeping a copy of an outside database, for example Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB or Snowflake, continuously up to date in OneLake as Delta tables inside a mirrored database. You query it in T-SQL via its SQL analytics endpoint, and the replication compute costs nothing.
- Dataflow Gen2
A visual, low-code Microsoft Fabric item for preparing data, based on Power Query. It links to data sources, transforms the data and writes the output to targets like a lakehouse or a warehouse.
Related terms
- Apache Airflow job
A code-first Fabric Data Factory item for orchestrating work as Python DAGs on managed Apache Airflow, offering starter or custom pools, autoscaling and syncing DAGs from Git. It succeeds Workflow Orchestration Manager in Azure Data Factory and sits alongside pipelines as their code-based counterpart.
- Copy job
Moves data between a source and a destination in Fabric Data Factory with no pipeline required. Runs can copy everything or just changes (incremental mode, driven by CDC or a watermark column), and the item keeps track of where the previous run stopped.